‘Time cloak’ makes event vanish

Researchers have demonstrated a “temporal cloak”—though on a very small scale—in the transport of information by a beam of light.

The trick is to create a gap in the beam of light, have the hidden event occur as the gap goes by and then stitch the beam back together, says Alexander Gaeta, professor of applied and engineering physics at Cornell University.

None of this will let you steal the crown jewels without anyone noticing. The gap created in the experiment was 15 picoseconds long, and might be increased up to 10 nanoseconds, Gaeta says. But the technique could have applications in fiber-optic data transmission and data processing, he adds.